Rusting in the Rain
by keystoneofscience
Summary: No one can be a teenager forever, so what's a teenage robot to do? Six years after the series, a desperately lonely Jenny Wakeman seeks information about her origins and receives consolation from an unlikely source.


**NOTICE**: _My Life as a Teenage Robot_ was created by Rob Renzetti and is copyright ©2002 by Viacom International, Inc. **This is a work of unauthorized fanfiction**; no association with Rob Renzetti or Viacom is implied nor should be inferred. Episodes of _My Life as a Teenage Robot _can be purchased from iTunes or from Amazon Video on Demand.

The inclusion in this notice of certain facts and disclaimers shall not be construed to deny or disparage other relevant facts and disclaimers.

* * *

"**F**ive o'clock."

The words broke Jenny Wakeman out of her dazed state, and she tried to remember where she was. Five o'clock—wasn't Brad supposed to call about now to say whether he'd be able to go blading at the skatepark down by the mall?—that is, assuming the _aliens_ were still safely being contained by Skyway Patrol; otherwise, Jenny would have to—

"Five o'clock, ma'am."

"Huh?" Jenny looked up to see the face of the elderly librarian.

"The library is closing now; you'll have to leave."

"Oh—oh, yes. Sorry!" That's right; it had been an uneventful day near the end of March, and she had been sitting at a desk at Tremorton Public Library trying to read a biography of Jane Austen. As she stood up and put the book away in her backpack, she wondered whether she should ask her mother for a memory tune-up. As part of the planetary defense system, she wasn't supposed to space out like that, and this wasn't the first time in recent weeks, either.

But if she was going to daydream like that, she wondered while standing outside the library, too engrossed in the line of thought to decide whether to walk or rocket home—if she was going to daydream, then why did she always imagine it was six or seven years ago? In reality, she hadn't talked to Brad in more than a year. Oh, it would have been easy enough to visit him at college (he had gone to a school out-of-state, but she could rocket there in twenty-five minutes at a leisurely Mach two), and could have phoned or emailed him literally without lifting a finger (of course she had built-in wireless, like nearly all robots), but somehow they had grown apart after high school. Or Brad had grown; Jenny wasn't sure whether the word _growth_ applied to her. Brad's little brother Tuck was still in town, now attending Tremorton High himself, but she didn't interact with him much anymore, either. There had been Sheldon, a geeky, whiny kid who had had a crush on her, and whose presence she had tolerated and even grown to not actively dislike, but he was off at college, too. Anyone else she might have called a friend lived near other stars; the time and expense of interstellar travel made it infeasible to visit more than occasionally.

In principle, she could have made new friends. But it wasn't easy. Despite her best efforts, she had never achieved any lasting popularity during high school; potential friends had the tendency to be scared off by her robotic nature and the wacky misadventures that tended to go along with her superheroing role. Her friendship with Brad had been due to luck, she observed now. There was no repeatable strategy, no algorithm she could execute to replace what she had had with him.

And now everything had changed. The high schoolers she had tried so desperately to fit in with had graduated and moved on with their lives. Most of the students in her year were now finishing up their Bachelor's degrees; the kids a grade or two ahead were starting careers, or marriages, or PhD programs. Jenny had graduated Tremorton High without incident along with the rest of her year, and suddenly found herself with no place to go. She _could_ have gone to college, but somehow that didn't seem right. She had been designed to be a _teenage_ robot with all the connotations the word implied, not a late-teens-or-early-twenties young adult robot. Some wordless intuition that could be neither questioned nor denied told her that she _belonged_ in high school in a way that she could have never belonged at college.

And yet she no longer belonged in high school, either; she had already done that. What was she supposed to do, repeat the ninth through twelfth grades indefinitely? Ridiculous! The High School Experience was by its nature limited to four years; if _her_ nature made her crave the High School Experience indefinitely, then that was just too bad. So she made no college or career plans. Superheroing would always keep her busy for some of the time. She just need to figure out what to do to fill up the rest of it, while everyone else grew up and she stayed exactly the same.

The loneliness and general ennui of her post-high-school living conditions shouldn't have been worse than her first five years, when her mother and inventor Dr. Nora Wakeman had kept her locked up away from the outside world while not fighting planetary threats, for fear of a negative reaction from the public. And yet it was much worse now, and not, she thought, simply because she had now known something better. Rather, she was occasionally plagued by a feeling that something unspeakably evil had been done to her, some unforgivable crime that stretched through every day of her existence, but that it had also been her fault. She had never been able to explain or understand the feeling in any greater detail than that.

Somehow, many months into her great loneliness—it had seemed completely out-of-character at the time, but it soon became second nature—she started spending her free time at the public library. The mall had lost its appeal to her: she didn't eat, didn't wear clothes, and could download music directly into her head; now that she wasn't trying to impress other teenagers she knew from school, there didn't seem to be any point. Mesmer's was out for the same reason. The park wasn't a good hangout, either. It was less crowded but still very public, and strangers tended to stare at her, which she had never gotten used to. Sometimes, when she caught a man staring, she would try to pretend he was ogling her sexually, which would have still been uncomfortable, but at least it would have been a different _kind_ of uncomfortable from the usual _Ew, freakish robot_ stare.

The library, however, had no such distracting mental associations or creepy stares; it was peaceful and quiet (probably more due to usually being virtually deserted rather than the anti-noise policy), and she could be alone with her thoughts. But she only had so many thoughts. After about two weeks, she had gone through the library's entire archives of _Seventeen_ and _Fashionista_ magazines, and it was then that she realized that the library had other books that she could read to pass the time. She had rarely read books outside of school before, but with no friends and nothing to do but stop the occasional bank robbery and destroy the occasional stray asteroid, she needed something to occupy her time. So she read: mostly fiction, but a lot of nonfiction, too: popularizations of history and politics, philosophy and science.

If it had started out just as a way to pass the time, it had become something more than that—but she couldn't say what that something more was. She could not name any particular fact or any particular book that had struck her as very important. She had mastered no discipline and couldn't remember the vast majority of what she had ostensibly read. And yet somehow the whole experience together added up to something important. It was as if she was learning for the first time that the world was _big_—no, that wasn't it; she had long known from her adventures as a superhero that the world was big. Rather, that the world was complicated. And old.

All the authors had their own interests and obsessions, their own perspective. There was a lot of overlap, but even the nonfiction books contradicted each other in a bunch of places. If Jenny could not experience the whole world directly, having only known herself the things she had seen as a teenage girl and robotic superhero, she would have to rely on the secondhand accounts in books, but if the books didn't present a coherent whole, but only a patchwork of different viewpoints, then what was she to believe? She supposed that this is what her high school English and history classes were ostensibly meant to do: expose her to this undiluted mass of thought. Somehow it hadn't worked then, hadn't taken.

And from the patchwork of viewpoints, it seemed that she picked up a strange new way of thinking: comparing the things she had known all her life to something an alien might have expected to see if it had only read history books. Maybe that was the name for what she had gotten from all those books: this odd sense of perspective, that the ordinary-seeming parts of her world _could_ have been otherwise, and maybe _should_ have. And maybe she had sort of thought the other way around before: looking at the "weird" parts of her robotic life, and comparing them negatively to what she thought of as ordinary. All the other girls had earrings and thus ears, therefore she should _too_, all the other girls and so on and so on ... But the particular way in which teenage girls did things in modern high schools was not the only way things had ever been done. The world was bigger than that.

Relativism had its limits. Even if there was some abstruse theoretical sense in which it was all a matter of viewpoint, there was no shaking the sense that she was _right_ to have wanted to fit in, and it was _wrong_ that she had failed. Whatever value she had gotten from the books was stained with a bitterness, and that sense that some awful crime had been committed against her. Whatever sense of perspective she had gained, and however valuable it was, it should have never happened. By her nature she wasn't meant to be cooped up in a library reading books, she was meant to be hanging out with _other teenagers_, and—

Except that was another part of the world that didn't make sense. She _wasn't_ a teenager, was she?—she was conscious every day of the feeling of _being a teenage girl_, but it wasn't really true, was it? She was a _robot_. That was the problem of the past few years; everyone else was _growing up_; kids were _supposed_ to grow up, and she wasn't and wasn't supposed to. But then unless she wanted to spend the rest of her life (and without the threat of senescence that humans faced that could be a long, long time) being bored reading and rereading the same library books, she needed to understand what her _purpose_ was, besides being a superhero.

Well, unlike a human, at least she had the option of asking her creator. She had been asking Dr. Wakeman questions about her work lately, out of an idle curiosity that had never asserted itself before, but had started to do so recently in these days of her loneliness and the public library. At first, it hadn't gone well: Dr. Wakeman spoke in an indecipherable technical jargon—Jenny thought of it has _geek-speak_—and it had taken a while before she learned how to speak in terms Jenny could understand. But throughout all these question-and-answer sessions, somehow Jenny had never thought to ask this one fundamental question. But she could, and she would now.

She wasn't sure whether this insight meant she should walk or rocket home; she ended up walking.

* * *

Dr. Wakeman was in her lab, as usual.

"Mom?" said Jenny.

"Yes, XJ-9?"

"Why did you build me to be a teenager?"

"What?"

"I mean, I never thought about it before, but it seems really _weird_. I mean, if you're building a planetary defense robot, can't you just—build a planetary defense robot? Why pattern it after a teenage girl? And what does that even _mean_, anyway? What makes a mind intrinsically that of a teenager, when our modern notion of teenagerhood is probably just a social construction anyway?"

"Those are very good questions, XJ-9. You see—" she paused.

"I'm listening, Mom."

"I'm just surprised. You'd never taken an interest in my work before, and lately you've been asking me all sorts of questions."

"I'm taking an interest now. I'm allowed to change, aren't I?"

"Yes, well." Dr. Wakeman might have still been puzzled by the recent change in her daughter's behavior, but she wasn't going to inquire further, if nothing else because the temptation to lecture—and with a willing audience lately!—was too great. She straightened, and began: "The field of artificial intelligence has been a mixed success at best. Even from its beginnings in the middle of the last century, there have been two largely distinct schools of thought within AI. Of course the practitioners didn't necessarily all identify themselves with one camp or the other, but the historical trend is clear. There was the humanoid school, which explicitly sought to make humanlike machines, by directly modeling the human brain, if necessary. And there was the _de novo_ school, which discarded the human model as flawed, and sought to understand the general principles of rational behavior and construct an intelligent machine from scratch.

"The _de novo_ school has been mostly a failure—at least, in its purest form, the dream of _general_ artificial intelligence. We do have elegant theoretical models of what general intelligence must be like in principle, but they require unreasonable amounts of computing power and are useless for actually building working minds. The practical, engineering side of the problem still lacks a unifying paradigm; we're stuck hacking together whatever techniques seem to work, without knowing how it fits into the true albeit unworkable theory of universal induction.

"I don't mean to minimize all the brilliant work that has been done in so-called 'narrow' AI; our civilization depends on machines that can quickly and efficiently do tasks that would be difficult or impossible for even the most highly skilled humans. But nearly all the algorithms we have only work in specific domain they were designed for; after all these years, we still don't know what mechanisms underlie creativity and learning of the type that humans approximately embody."

"'Approximately'?" inquired Jenny.

"Yes. It would be a fantastic coincidence indeed if natural selection had happened to result in an optimal intelligence, any more than a lion's claws are the optimal weapon."

"I don't—"

"Thus, while we can build somewhat intelligent non-humanoid robots, they lack—well, remember how you were disappointed by the robotics convention I took you once?"

"Yeah," Jenny said, "those robots were lame. Most of them couldn't even talk. And the ones that could were—I don't know—"

"Brittle?"

"Yeah."

"Quite. And that brittleness was actually the downfall of my first big defense contract."

"You mean—"

"Let's not talk about that, dear. After that disgrace, I spent a few years studying the works of researchers in the humanoid school. Much progress had been made in modeling the brain, and there were already some early prototypes of fully humanoid robots based on composites of human brain scans. So I began to consider hybrid approaches: use an artificial brain modeled of composite scans of humans, and _integrate_ it with narrow-AI and machine-learning techniques. The new Advanced Cybocell-17 framework seemed to make that feasible. The first models in the XJ series—"

"—my _sisters_—"

"—were also failures. But then you were slightly less of a f—I mean, a _complete success_! So, to answer your original questions, there were solid engineering reasons for designing you as a teenage girl. I had to base your basic intelligence and personality on a composite of many human brain scans, in order to average out all the individual idiosyncrasies; that way, it was possible to rely on known facts about human nueroanatomy in general, rather than risk having to scrap the project halfway through because it turned out that the human model happened to have an unusual parietal lobe. Similarly, there are small but nontrivial functional sex and age differences in the brain. A composite of mixed sexes and ages wouldn't have worked, and I had to choose some demographic. Now, whether or not our culture's notion of teenagerhood is a 'social construction,'" here Dr. Wakeman drew scare quotes in the air with her middle and index fingers, "is irrelevant on two counts. Firstly, we're talking about brain maps; all psychological traits are embodied in the brain regardless of their ultimate origin, and so you've inherited psychological traits from the reference sample of teenage girls, whether or not those traits were environmentally or genetically induced in the first place. To the extent that it makes sense to talk about the separate contributions of environment of genetics, anyway. For one thing, the geneticist's technical concept of _heritability_ isn't exactly the same thing as—"

"Please stay on topic, Mom."

"Secondly," said Dr. Wakeman, "while it may not be the same thing as what we think of as _teenagerhood_, but there _are_ neurological measurements relevant to your functions that peak around age sixteen. Thus there is a real sense in which you are inherently a teenager."

"That makes sense," said Jenny. "And why a girl?"

"Think of the male androids you know, dear."

Jenny thought for a few moments. "Ohhh, I get it." After a few moments, Jenny asked, "Why didn't you tell me any of this before?"

"I did. It's in your instruction manual."

"Why wasn't I paying attention?" Jenny moaned. "Don't answer that. I think I can guess."

Jenny turned to go, and as she was leaving, Dr. Wakeman called after her, "Oh, and if you see your friend Sheldon, tell him that I need my quantum defibrillator back!" Sheldon had occasionally borrowed parts from Dr. Wakeman for his own projects.

Jenny stopped and turned, agape. "Sheldon's back? I thought he was at college."

"Yes, his mother said so when I chanced into her at the Chamber of Commerce meeting."

"Thanks, Mom. I'll go tell him." And she was off. Somehow Sheldon was just whom she wanted to see right now. She hadn't spoken to him in years, but he was smart, and no doubt willing—_eager_—to listen. She had some dim hope that he would be able to offer some insight on the misery of her present condition, but mostly she just wanted someone closer to her own mental age to talk to.

* * *

Sheldon's mother had informed her that he was in his bedroom and that Jenny was welcome to go knock.

As she approached the door, she heard a man's voice saying something with rhythmic, precise diction. It was noticeably a man's voice, which disturbed her; she had trouble thinking of Sheldon as a man. She peeked through a crack in the door. He was pacing and reciting poetry.

"Jenny kissed me when we met,  
Jumping from the chair she sat in;  
Time, you thief, who love to get  
Sweets into your list, put _that_ in!  
_Say_ I'm weary, _say_ I'm sad;  
_Say_ that health and wealth _have missed me_;  
Say I'm growing old, but add—"

She decided that moment was as good as any to open the door. "Hi, Sheldon."

"_Jenny!_" It was almost a scream.

"I like that poem you were reciting. Did you write it?"

"_Certainly not!_" There was a beat of silence, and he went on: "It's a classic, by Leigh Hunt. He died in 1859; the _Jenny_ of the poem was Thomas Carlyle's wife. I've always been drawn to Victorian-era poetry because—"

"Methinks the gentleman doth protest too much," Jenny said. "It's okay, Sheldon. I know."

"That's actually a slight misquotation," he said in a dead little voice. "And the word _protest_ didn't mean the same thing in Shakes—oh my God, Jenny!" with no warning, he flopped prostrate on the ground and put his hands at her feet. "Oh, Jenny, my God," he murmured, in the tone of a correction.

"Uh, surprised to see me?"

"A little."

"I've missed you, Sheldon. No, _not_ in that way," she hastened to add after noticing his excited expression looking up at her.

He looked down. "Of course."

"But as a familiar face. A friend."

"I am—glad to be your friend."

"So what are you doing back in Tremorton? Spring break?"

"Actually, I just graduated."

"Graduated?—but Brad and other people in our year don't graduate until June, at least."

He shrugged. "I finished a quarter early. I have a job lined up to start in June, but I'm going to take the couple months until then to rest and work on some personal projects here at my mom's house. Maybe reread some old comic books. A nice vacation."

"Uh huh," she said, "and what did you study, again?"

"_Science!_"

"That sounds a little broad."

"Computer science," he said, almost mumbling. "With an emphasis in artificial intelligence," he added, a little more brightly.

"_Oh!_" she exclaimed.

"Oh?"

"Well, it's just that—_I'm_ an artificial intelligence," she said, with no embarrassment at stating the obvious.

"Actually, I was inspired to go into the field because of _you_," he said. "I guess I thought—well, it's silly."

"Say it."

"I shouldn't—"

"Sheldon, I _know_. Go ahead and say it."

"I guess I thought—it was a way of getting closer to you."

She stared at the wall. "Closer than I am to myself."

"What do you mean?"

"_I_ don't know anything about AI—I mean, at a technical level. I've been asking my mom questions lately, and it took a lot of training just to get her to slow down and put it into English. But like the first time, I asked about how my reaction time compares to normal humans and she just went on and on about—I don't remember, invisible mark-off models—"

"Hidden Markov models?"

"You know about them?"

"Oh, sure, sure, a classic technique! I used hidden Markov models in my third-year project on automatic inference from bioinformatic data. Well, actually it was mostly Kalman filtering, but you can sort of think of that as the continuous analogue of—"

"Sheldon, _stop_."

He stopped.

"I don't know what you're talking about," she said. "And I'm starting to guess that you _can't _tell me. You use science words and it means something to you, and to my mom, but—"

"But it takes years of study to build up the vocabulary, yes."

A few moments passed in silence. Jenny asked, "Sheldon, when was it that you found out that the world has a _beneathness_ to it, that it's all connected underneath?"

"I don't know what you mean."

"I mean, I've always been a robot, I knew I was designed—partially, anyway—but it's only recently that I'm realizing that there _is_ such a thing as AI to be studied. I had always taken the world for granted; I had never imagined that things could be otherwise, and now—I can't trust my perceptions of how things are as being the basic things that the world is made out of."

"A little more than two years ago," he said. "That I realized, I mean. I had always just passively accepted the fact of physical conservation laws, but then I learned about Noether's theorem, which states that—"

Jenny gave him a pointed half-lidded expression. Miraculously, he took the hint. "Well, it's cool stuff," he said. "So anyway," he frowned, "I'm curious. Why did you come to see me today?"

"My mom mentioned that you were in town, and we're old friends, so, you know ..." she trailed off. "Why do you ask? I thought you would be overjoyed to see me."

"Oh, but I am! More than I could possibly say!"

"I'm actually surprised you didn't loiter around my house the minute you got back to Tremorton."

"The thought occurred to me, but I resisted. I've come to realize that I have no right to impose myself on you, when—" he took a breath, as if to steel his courage, and continued, "you don't feel the same about me as I feel about you. And I can't change that."

"You finally noticed."

"I am—in some ways—a slow learner. I'm just glad you don't hate me."

"Why would I hate you?"

"In my pursuit of you, I didn't always treat you well."

"And I've done mean things to you a few times. I can't hold a grudge against you forever for things you said or did during high school. You've grown up," she said. "Unlike me," she added so quietly that she wasn't sure Sheldon heard it. "We could call it even."

"But there are things you don't know about," Sheldon said nervously. "Remember the Silver Shell?"

"What about him?"

Sheldon froze. "I accept your offer! We'll call it even!" he said, suddenly animated.

Jenny was puzzled; there had always been something odd in Sheldon's manner whenever the Silver Shell came up in conversation, and the nature of Sheldon's relationship with that other crime-fighting robot had never been made clear—she had never even seen the two of them in the same place at the same time. But she didn't choose to push the matter further. "O-kay."

"Anyway, I _was_ curious. Since you didn't come here solely to enjoy my company—"

"Well—" If she did not love Sheldon, he didn't repulse her anymore, either, and Jenny wanted to be kind.

"But you didn't." His tone was insistent, as if to declare that he had been preparing to hear the awful truth for years and would not be denied that exquisite pain, even for the most pleasant and deferential of lies.

"No," Jenny said. "Not exactly."

"Which means you must have had some other reason. Something you want for me, something I can do for you—"

"I don't—"

"To clarify, I'm not offended," Sheldon said. "I'll do anything for you. I just want to know what it is."

"I just wanted to talk," Jenny said. "I'm—very confused, and very lonely, and maybe talking would help."

"Alright," Sheldon said. "Let's talk. What are you confused about, and what is the source of your l—" he stumbled on the word, "your loneliness?"

"I've always had a lot of regrets about the freakishness of my existence."

"You're not a—"

"Let me finish, Sheldon."

He inclined his head. "Go on."

"It's only after high school that the full realization of my freakishness has set in. And it's such a terrible reversal! I was always trying to emulate the other teenage girls, but I didn't notice, didn't realize that part of being a teenage girl is growing up and not being a teenager anymore. Whereas I can never have that; I'm designed to psychologically be a teenager, despite still being only chronologically twelve years old. I can't keep going back to high school, I've already had that experience and it wouldn't be the same after the first time. I need something to do with my life when I'm not fighting crime and general mayhem, I need some new social role to fit in, but I'm not designed for one and can't create it for myself. I don't know what to do."

"I'm—sorry."

"I don't know how to explain things better, but I feel like my entire life has just been _wrong_ somehow, like the world around me doesn't fit together properly. I feel like people should have _life-stories_. They should change and grow in some unpredictable but coherent way."

"I don't think I understand," said Sheldon. "How has your life been lacking in dramatic narrative? You're a superhero!"

"Drama yes, narrative no. I feel like my life has been a series of—I don't know what word I'm looking for. A series of disconnected, self-contained, vaguely ridiculous adventures, after which everything returns to normal and the adventures might as well have never happened."

"_Episodes_?" he suggested.

"That's it! A series of episodes!"

"I still don't understand the complaint," Sheldon said. "Disconnected episodes? You've saved the planet on more than one occasion. If it weren't for you, we'd be slaves of Cluster Prime, or worse. It doesn't get any more continuous than that."

"I wonder, though? In what sense was that _me_? Wasn't it my mother?"

"What do you mean?"

"I'm just a machine, an automaton. I'm a hack, put together from the brain scans of ten thousand dead teenage girls and a bunch of mysterious AI techniques that I don't understand. I've longed to be a normal girl—a _woman_—but in the end I'm just a tool, aren't I? Made to serve a particular purpose."

"No, no, no! Don't ever think that, Jenny!"

"Isn't it true, though? Wasn't I designed, don't all my powers derive from the engineering prowess of the great Dr. Nora Wakeman?"

"But the same thing goes for all of us! Yes, your design was generated because a dozen years ago, Dr. Wakeman's brain was doing something that roughly corresponded to maximizing the sum of the utilities of possible outcomes weighted by probability. But humans aren't self-caused, either: our design was generated because millions of years ago, the ecosystem was doing something that roughly corresponded to the change in a trait equaling the covariance of fitness and the trait, divided by mean fitness."

"_Speak Engli_—" she cut herself off. "I mean, _I_ don't understand that," she said.

"Everything that happens, happens within the laws of physics. Even if you buy the Copenhagen interpretation and think that some things are inherently random, then that's all it is: randomness with no moral valence. In order to be something other than uniform noise, you have to be some specific thing with a specific design, that came to exist for specific reasons. And within that space of definite things with definite causes, there's no reason to morally privilege one set of causes over another: the fact that you did something because you were designed to doesn't make you somehow inferior to humans who do something else—because those humans are themselves the product of their culture and of natural selection; just because the design, or-should-I-say-_optimization_ process is harder to understand in that case, doesn't make it any less a design."

"I'm not—"

"And it's not even obvious that your design is easier to comprehend than that of humans or other animals, even when you consider that Dr. Wakeman based your personality of a composite of brain scans rather than designing every aspect of your mind from scratch. It depends on what level of understanding we're talking about. Dr. Wakeman assembled you from components already available in the greater economy—steel, CPUs, and so forth—but the economic process that produced those is itself a very sophisticated emergent system—whether it's more or less complex than the biosphere is anyone's guess. The point is, it's all one unified flow of causality: you don't need to think that your reasons for doing things are somehow inferior to those of humans. 'Nature' isn't on the side of anyone in particular, because on our modern understanding, _nature_ is just the word we use to refer to that which exists! Get it?"

"Actually ... no."

Sheldon slumped. "What part should I explain again?"

"I just don't agree with you," she said. "Teenagers are supposed to grow up and become men and women and have jobs and raise children. What does that have to do with evolution or physics?"

"_Everything!_ The very concept of certain things being 'supposed to' happen is a specific intuition—teleological thinking—that happens to be built into human and android psychology. The intuition has its uses, but it's not a property of the world itself, which runs on cause-and-effect, not _reasons_."

"What a bizarre notion."

"Past a certain threshold of philosophical sophistication, it's obvious."

"So I'm unsophisticated, is that it?" she asked rhetorically, with a noticeable metallic edge in her voice.

"Well," he said. "You've already figured out that the world—has a beneathness to it, you said? It all fits together, certain truths are entangled with other truths, we can have maps of multiple levels but ultimately there's only one world?"

"I guess so."

"So if you believe that science works, and you know that I've studied it more than you have, if you think that I know things, doesn't it make sense to trust me—actually not really trust, but interpret my words as strong Bayesian evidence?—even if you don't yet understand all the details yourself?"

"I thought Science was about arguments and evidence—you're basically just telling me to shut up."

"I didn't mean it like that. It's just that other people's opinions _are_ probabilistic evidence—"

"Spare me. I just want a normal life, a _good_ life—that's what I've wanted all along, and even if I'm a little late in figuring out what it's all about—"

"You have _no idea_ what it's all about—"

"There you go again—"

"Jenny, _please_. I'm only having this argument with you because, despite everything, after everything—I _do_ love you. You're a special person, and I don't want to see you misled into debasing your own uniqueness on the basis of some damned Pinocchio myth."

"Pinocchio?"

"A fictional character popularized in a twentieth-century movie. Pinocchio was a wooden puppet that aspired to become a real human boy."

"Okay, but what does that have to do with m—_oh_."

"We live in a sick culture that reifies the so-called 'natural' and demonizes everything new or different," he said, his voice suddenly sounding less manly and more like the whiny teenager she had remembered him as. "Not only is it cruel, it puts a brake on progress. Our world was supposed to be better than this."

"_Supposed_ to? I thought you didn't believe in that kind of telo—uh—"

"_Teleology_. Well, okay, I don't," he said. "A flaw in the humanoid cognitive architecture: you can't stop projecting purposefulness onto the world itself even after you know better. And yet somehow it still seems that the flaw can be repurposed for scientific uses. While of course the first ethic of science is that observation is the source of all knowledge, science isn't just about cataloging data; it's about finding an underlying theory that accounts for it all. Some might argue that if objects suddenly stopped obeying Newton's laws, then the properly scientific thing to do would be do say, 'Well, so much for Newton's laws, then.' I don't agree. Newton's laws are too elegant and explain too much. It makes sense for them to be superseded in the sense of being the limiting low-velocity case of relativity, but they can't just _fail_ one day. A _de novo_ AI might say it needs to broaden its hypothesis-space. As a human, it just feels like the world is _wrong_."

"How so? What's wrong with the world?"

"Well, it's more like Newton's laws failing decades before we were born, then reading about them in books and wondering why no one seems to notice or care about the gaping anomaly."

"Which is?" said Jenny, with the same intonation she would have used to say, _Get to the point, Sheldon_.

"The economy used to _grow_. Regularly, averaging a few percentage points a year."

Jenny knew that economic growth was the sort of thing that grown-ups cared about, but she was _not_ a grown-up, and did not share their language. "So?" she asked.

"Jenny, economic growth isn't just a number printed in the paper that grown-ups care about for no reason. It's a measure of what our civilization knows how to do. And if growth is a constant fraction of existing wealth, then wealth over time follows an exponential."

"So?"

Sheldon sighed. "When I was a child, my mother told me to _never_ underestimate an exponential." He looked thoughtful for a moment. "Then I learned about the Ackermann function and Busy Beavers, and then exponentials didn't seem like such a big deal anymore ... but the moral still stands. Exponentials _blow up_: two, four, eight, sixteen, thirty-two, sixty-four dot dot dot four-point-three billion. Our world doesn't look like that."

"What is it supposed to look like?"

"_Different_."

Jenny and Sheldon chorused, "That's not really an answer."

"Right," Sheldon continued. "But I mean, okay, our civilization has accomplished some pretty cool things over the last century. We have _you_—" Jenny looked uncomfortable. Sheldon said, "I meant, as a representative example of progress in robotics and AI. We have faster-than-light travel, and contact with alien civilizations, and—from what I can tell from the historical sources I've read, that seems to be _it_."

"That's not bad for one century."

"No, I mean that's _it_—a priori, I would expect the things I've mentioned to spark other developments, but instead they've acted like isolated point changes. We're not talking about small things here!"

"I—guess I can sort of see what you mean. Like I've watched movies and read books about teenagers back in the late twentieth century, and the social scene of high school seemed very familiar. Like I would fit right in—I mean, not that I ever fit in, but that I would not-fit-in in the same way."

"Exactly. Why?"

"Well, why not? Couldn't you just be wrong?"

"I know I know I _know_; I agree that it's highly suspicious to put so much trust in a theory that doesn't even successfully retrodict the stuff that's already happened; I've spent long hours questioning my rationality, wondering whether I've just hallucinated a pattern from the books that I've happened to have read. But it's not as if exponential economic growth was just an empirical trend that happened to peter out; there are deep reasons to expect it. Knowledge is the true source of the wealth of nations, as people create innovations, share them, and figure out how to do things more efficiently. It's reasonable to assume that the rate of change of innovation is proportional to the number of wealth and people we already have: dee-pee-dee-tee equals kay implies pee equals cee ee to the—" Jenny was almost glaring. "There's math for this one," Sheldon said. "Population growth used to be exponential, for the same reason."

"So what are you saying? Maybe they've stopped for the same reason? I suppose you also want to start a breeding campaign to get women to have more children. Well—_I_ can't help you with that one," Jenny said.

"I don't think so," said Sheldon. "Actually, what's really special about the last few hundred years is that economic growth has been _faster_ than population growth; that's the only way for standards of living to rise, otherwise it just gets eaten up by excess population—try Googling _Malthusian_."

"I read about Malthusianism," said Jenny, with an air of annoyance. In fact, though she remembered the word, she recalled almost nothing about the economic ideas it stood for—but there was no need for Sheldon to know that. "You know, you still haven't answered my earlier question," she said. "How do you expect things would be different, if you were right? What cool toys should we have, that we don't actually?"

"Oh, you know. Superintelligence, molecular nanotechnology, the conversion of all available matter into an optimal computing substrate—is that a look of horror or incomprehension?" he asked casually. Apparently he was used to his.

"Both! The conversion of all available matter into _what_?"

"Computronium. Look, the current setup we have is a horrible waste of negentropy."

"What's—" Jenny was about to say, _What's negentropy?_, but she already knew the answer: some stupid Science Word that Sheldon couldn't or wouldn't explain to her.

Sheldon continued, "We don't and _can't_ experience reality directly. Everything we think and feel is a simulation created by our brains. Living as a computer simulation is the same thing, only cheaper and with more control."

"Sheldon, that's _awful_. People _like _having physical bodies."

"All the sensations of having a body can be simulated."

"You mean _faked_," Jenny said. Sheldon shrugged, as if to dismiss the point as a difference that makes no difference.

Jenny said, "I can't believe you would advocate such a unnatrual thing."

"_Unnatural_, says the teenage robot."

"Yes!" Jenny said defiantly. "The teenage robot who is mired in existential misery and sometimes wishes she had never been built. No irony here."

Sheldon looked down at his hands. "I wish you didn't say things like that," he said. "It hurts me."

"And I'm supposed to feel sorry for _you_, then?"

"Of course not." He straightened, "It's just—for my own reasons, I think you're _better_ than normal people, and it's _wrong _that you should be made to feel inferior and freakish. And in fact, I would venture the hypothesis that the same set of cultural forces and social pressures that have held our civilization stagnant, are the exactly those that have been making you so miserable. Frankenstein bias: people fear the new and different, and come to think that the particular way that their culture happens to do things is the way thing inherently, teleologically _ought to be_. Doesn't that match your experience? The way people have sneered at you and feared you, just because you're a robot?"

"Ye-ess ..." Jenny said slowly.

"So that's the mechanism for the economic slowdown, as well as your own personal loneliness and exclusion," said Sheldon. "And that sort of cultural drag is almost certainly a part of species-typical psychology. What I want to know is _why _the drag has overwhelmed the driving force."

Jenny thought Sheldon was insensitive for continuing to prattle on with his irrelevant armchair sociology through what had been an emotionally vulnerable moment. But, she waxed philosophical, that was Sheldon, and she had come to see Sheldon, after all ...

"Why do you care?" she said.

"What?"

"Why do you even care, about all this future economic growth and computronium stuff?"

"Besides the obvious personal benefits of immortality, intelligence enhancement, and the like?"

"Uh ..." Jenny didn't know what to say to that, so she continued, "What I meant was, your life is going well enough, isn't? You were unpopular in high school, but at least you've got a future in society. I see that you're attached to this weird social theory, but—well, what's your problem? Why is it so personal to you?"

Sheldon took a breath. "There are a number of responses I could give to that."

"Pick one."

He nodded. "Alright, it's not about me. It's about wrenching our species's destiny off of its natural course."

"I don't understand."

"Nature doesn't care for us, Jenny. All our moral intuitions about how things _ought to be_ mean nothing to the laws of physics, nor the ravages of evolution. And yet, in some species, intelligence develops, and civilization develops, and a species tries to take control of its destiny, reshape its environment, rather than letting the environment shape it. We're not done with the job, yet. Until we have all the technology that the laws of physics allow, wielded precisely with all the intelligence that the true laws of inductive inference allow—then we're not safe."

"Safe from _what_, exactly?"

"Anything that could threaten our values. Stray asteroid, alien threat, our own culture evolving and changing in ways that _we_ would disapprove of. Our civilization might _seem_ stable to us, and in fact it's been far more culturally stable than my understanding of the situation would predict—but it _can't_ be stable in the long run. Disjunction rule of probability theory: even if the probability of existential disaster is small in any particular small interval, if you _integrate_ over—" now Jenny was actually glaring at him. Sheldon desisted.

He said, "It's not that I don't like things the way they are. On the contrary. But as long as there are intelligent entities with a use for computation, then in the long-run equilibrium, we should expect all available matter to be converted into computronium. If _we_ don't do it for the sake of the things we want, then someone else _will_. So unless you're eager to be killed my murderous aliens or a rogue artificial intelligence—"

Jenny blanched. "Obviously I don't mean _you_," said Sheldon. "I meant a powerful but unfriendly _de novo_. But the broader point is this: I would _love_ for our world to stay exactly the way it is forever; I'm _glad_ for the cultural stasis that has somehow come to dominate this planet. But that can't happen. I want to steal the universe for the sake of the things that do exist, that I do love."

Sheldon's breathing grew noticeably heavy. "Becuase you and me, Jenny, our lives, our dreams, our hopes, our ambitions, are a cosmic coincidence, a product of the particular way life has happened to develop on one planet. Roll the evolutionary dice again, and there's no way you would get the same result—no _reason_ to get anything we would find at all valuable. Look at me. I'm in love with a robot! From the standpoint of evolution _or_ culture, there's _no reason_ for that to happen. You're _not_ a woman." He knocked his fist against her chest with a resounding _clang_.

"_Sheldon!_"

He continued, oblivious to her offense, "And yet it _did_ happen, I _do_ exist, and I'm not going to live and fight and grow for my love, even if it is a maladaptive evolutionary accident which has no right to exist. No _evolutionary_ right to exist, indeed! For to think of all the hours I spent in this very bed fantasizing about—when—" he stared, scrutinizing her. "You don't even have a vagina, do you?"

"_Sheldon!_"

He put his head down, finally conscious of having crossed a line he had no right to cross. "Sorry."

A few moments passed in silence. "Actually, I, um, did ask my Mom to build me a vagina once," Jenny ventured awkwardly. "You know, on the grounds that all the other girls had one. That—didn't go well."

"I suppose I'm not entitled to hear the full story."

"That's right; you're not," she said firmly.

A few moments of cold silence passed between them.

"I guess," said Jenny, "we're both freaks, and we both have our own psychological problems, neither of which have been resolved today. I just don't want to waste my life wallowing away in this—trap—"

"_You've_ got time, at least—insofar as any of us do. With proper maintenance, you should last as long as any human—even indefinitely, as long as our civilization lasts."

"Sure. With the strength of a million and seventy men, I guess I really shouldn't complain. Still, I wish ..." she trailed off.

"You wish—what?"

"I wish I knew what to wish for."

More silence. Sheldon cleared his throat.

"Maybe we could talk again sometime?" said Jenny. "I've been suffering—being so alone—"

Sheldon snorted and rolled his eyes. "Welcome to _my_ life." Then, conscious of having made yet another _faux pas_, he said, "_Wait, I mean_—"

"No," said Jenny, taking his hand. "It's alright. And welcome to mine."

Sheldon leaned a little bit closer to her and pushed his lips together just a bit, almost as if he were expecting a kiss. Jenny nodded, and left. •

**THE END**


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